All the Young Dudes ( Sirius' Perspective )

Azkaban

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling

Flowing into the night?

People so busy, make me feel dizzy

Taxi light shines so bright

But I don’t need no friends

As long as I gaze on

Waterloo sunset

I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world from my window

But chilly, chilly is the evening time

Waterloo sunset’s fine (Waterloo sunset’s fine)

1981

At first, he thought they might protect him.

Sirius clung to the memories, the way a drowning man might cling to scraps of debris in the water. He gripped them, desperately, in shaking fingers; he held them like a shield in his mind.

Prongs’s laugh; Lily’s gentle smile; Marlene leaning against Yasmin’s shoulder, rolling her eyes; the fire in the Gryffindor common room; Mary climbing onto his shoulders for a piggy-back ride; the joy of a prank perfectly executed; Moony—Moony smiling, Moony laughing, Moony holding him, kissing his shoulders, his neck…

It was a foolish, pathetic attempt. Sirius realised very quickly that the memories didn’t protect him from anything—happiness only drew the dementors, like moths to a flame. Anytime he reached for them, searching for a breath of air to stop him from drowning in his own grief, they gathered outside the bars of his window, feasting. James’s laughter was replaced with his slack, lifeless mouth; Lily’s smile with her dead eyes, Marlene and Yasmin and Mary all erased by the horrible onslaught of the worst nights of his life…

Still, Sirius was too weak to go without them. Time and time again, he would find himself reaching, helplessly, for the happy memories—any shred of light or kindness that he could find.

Until the day he forgot Euphemia’s smile.

It was a bad night, a hard night. They were all bad, of course, and incredibly hard—but Sirius hadn’t slept in what felt like days, and he was desperate for anything to stave off the nightmares that he knew would pounce like hungry wolves the moment he closed his eyes. So he thought of Mrs. Potter, the woman who had been more of a mother to him than his own ever was—he remembered the day she had helped him move into his new room, trying to recall the way she had beamed at him before pulling him into a tight hug.

He couldn’t.

The memory had corroded; dissolved; large chunks of it missing, eaten away. When he tried to recall Mrs. Potter’s happy grin, he could see only her tired, withered eyes, blinking up at him from a hospital bed the last time he’d ever visited her.

When he finally fell into a fitful sleep, he dreamt only of sickness and caskets.

1982

Hope died quickly in Azkaban. By the time New Year’s Day passed, Sirius had realised that Remus wasn’t coming for him. By the time spring came around, he had accepted it.